BANNED

Just a bunch of drabbles me and my friends submit. Not all are necessarily banned. That's just a promotion. Oops.

[memories]

apparently, I joined this tumblr place at 03/30/2009 9:41:12 PM.

[cyle]

if anyone wants to see when they signed up for tumblr, visit the above post. it displays your registration timestamp when you view the post itself, but when you reblog it, it’ll copy that timestamp.

that blog is a little bit of chaotic tumblr magic i built for april fools a long time ago.

[evilwizard]

i consider this a sort of spell circle tbh

[rozecrest]

hey don’t cry. spiro the bald eagle failing at catching a crab, okay?

[mrsmarlasinger]

[pocketlad]

I think I once heard Charles Martinet say at a panel, the script for Mario Teaches Typing 2 had Mario telling the player negative things if they failed but he himself changed the lines and instead said things like “That was great, but I know you can do even better” and “That wasn’t as fast as last time..let’s try again” because in his mind he had already decided that he wanted Mario to be always loving

[pocketlad]

I wasn’t expecting this many people to see this, so I’m going to try to dig for some peoples’ panel recordings to confirm if I’m remembering right

[pocketlad]

That didn’t take long, thank goodness!!! I found a recording by Dan8675309 on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9RywNQXCUM (the timestamp is around 20:29)

“When I got the script and I’m in the studio, I’m reading the script, you know, for the first time, there were things like ‘You failed,’ ‘That wasn’t very good,’ ‘That was much worse’ ‘That was bad.’ And I was reading that and I said ‘Can I…do you mind if I just like, play with these words a little bit and just change them around? Because you know…I never say ‘no’ and I never say anything negative as Mario. And the producer graciously said, ‘Sure! Go for it!’ And so, it became ‘Oh! That was good, but I know you can do even better!’ ‘Ooh, nice one but let’s try again!’ So it was always uplifting and always trying to be positive. And I think…that is the essence of the character to me. It’s that love and that joy…and you know, I think that in our world we should all be loving and joyful to each other.”

He went on for much longer than this, and had very sweet and wise things to say. But I’ll leave it off there as this is a post about the Mario part, and it would be getting too long. if you’d like to hear the rest you can check the video out.

[kedreeva]

Oh god, I just aged several years in a single second, a friend of mine sent me a snippet from a fic that read someone put a VHS into a VCR and took so long getting back to it to press play that the menu screen had looped multiple times

[alexseanchai]

every time I think maybe I am putting too much effort into researching the details of technological advances I lived through, something like this crosses my dash

[beatrice-otter]

For the young whippersnappers who don’t understand the issue, VHS tapes don’t have menu screens. That is not technologically possible on a tape.

A magnetic tape works because information has been magnetically encoded on the tape. The tape is very long, and is wound around two little spools, one at the end, one at the beginning. In the middle is a part where it is flat and there is a thing called a ‘head’ and it reads the magnetic encoding on the bit of the tape next to it and converting it into sound and/or images. When the tape plays, the little spools wind/unwind so that new sections of tape are constantly being run past the head. Every single thing a VCR can do is a function of controlling which part of the tape is next to the head.

You put the tape in the machine and press play on the machine, and it plays. You press stop and it stops. You press play again and it starts playing right where it left off, because while it’s stopped the tape is not moving past the head. You can pause it instead of stop it, which will leave the frame you paused on on the TV (in contrast to stopping, when the screen goes dark). You can fast forward, and it will wind the tape forward towards the end. You can rewind and it will wind the tape back to the beginning.

[whetstonefires]

in my experience it usually played automatically on being fed a tape, and you had to pause or stop it to prevent this, which was awkward sometimes when the tv volume turned out to be set way too high

unless of course the tape hadn't been rewound before being taken out last time. then, unless auto-rewind was a feature of the VCR in question, you had to push that button first to get back to the start so the movie was watchable.

also if you wanted it to rewind quickly instead of playing the entire film backwards, silently, at maybe double speed, you pushed 'stop' first and it lifted the tape away from the reader to respool at speed.

[beatrice-otter]

#reminds me of the fic#where they went to great lengths to make it clear pictures were being taken on film

#and then someone took the camera away and 'looked through the pictures'#to see what they were of and if they were Forbidden Content#and then gave the camera back like no harm had been done and i'm like

#so she...didn't rip the film out and ruin it? then what just happened?

#OH. OH THIS CHILD HAS NEVER EXPERIENCED. NOT DIGITAL.

[sparkylurkdragon]

Now that I have processed this somewhat, here's some other tidbits:

Tapes had no mandatory ads at the front. Oh, sure, there often were ads at the front, but there was no way to prevent just fast forwarding through them.

For the busy among us who wanted to watch a film while another was rewinding, separate tape rewinding devices were sold.

Tape rental places would ask you to "please be kind, rewind!" and some places charged a rewinding fee if you didn't.

Music was affected by the jump from tapes to disc, too! I remember it blowing my mind that CDs could replay a track instantly, instead of me having to memorize how long it took to rewind a tape to play back a tune.

Both VCRs and music tape players would occasionally break and "eat" the tape, which meant an unspooled, destroyed tape and having to take the player apart to free the tape from it. Sometimes the player could be fixed afterwards, and sometimes it couldn't.

Sometimes if you played the same portion of a tape over and over, it would lead to tape degradation: distorted video and audio, or even the tape snapping and having to get a new one. (I did this to at least one Disney movie - don't remember which - and one soundtrack.)

Adjusting the tracking! I don't remember how this physically works but if the video is jumping around, sometimes you would have to adjust it so the VCR reads the tape correctly. Looks like there's some how-to guides out there on the Internet on how to do this. Usually there was a button on the remote to do this.

Some VCRs were extra fancy and had digital clocks built into them. After a power outage, they would reset to 12:00 and flash. Adjusting the clock was a strange and mysterious process that a lot of folks never got the hang of, so their VCRs just had 12:00 flashing on them at all times.

[emeraldmercury]

[the-davest-of-uncles]

My dad never could set the clock on his VCR. He put a postage stamp over it.

[mister-christmas]

[silentbutlively]

And the fact that all of this was still pretty relevant like 15 to 17 years ago Which doesn’t even feel like that long ago anyway

[ro-zden]

I'm 28, and this is all very familiar to me. Granted, we didn't have a PS1 until around 2005, and getting laptop? Wifi? Around 2011. I was using library computers and floppy disks throughout the 2000s. (For the record, I even made the switch over from memory sticks, and I'm very much using the cloud). I didn't get a smartphone until 2013, and I still use mp3 players.

I have all this knowledge around the older tech that I don't get to use anymore, and everyone acts like it's from a bygone era.

[n00b-vegas]

Probably won’t finish this, but I like spooky vibe

[boredth]

Ain’t no sunshine

[rustazure]

That meme

[rhube]

Misery reprieve today brought to you by Chi Nguyen, her inseparable bowls, and the people on Twitter trying to help her separate them:

Featuring an array of helpful suggestions, such as this, from Vladimir Pukin:

The house spouse's favourite, duct tape:

And probably the most helpful:

And did you know that if you just paste a Twitter link in, on mobile, Tumblr now just displays the friggin' tweet? Awesome!

[hiddenlookingglass]

You guys, it's been solved!!! The bowl is unstuck!

[spnjohnlocked]

[crookedheron]

today I am back on my 3d nonsense, and you would not believe the technical hoops I needed to jump through to do this

[iblewthewhistle]

So I found a wind key music box mechanism and decided I'd make a farcry 5 Amazing Grace box. Swords, the box and Only you notes for Jacob, Scales, a knife and tattoo gun for John, Faith's bliss flowers, and Joseph's scars/tattoos.

[wheelsofdeath]

Overwatch Animated Short | “The Wastelander” [4K]

[crookedheron]

good evening might I offer some rhack

[kelseyherbst]

[sircolinmorgan]

we don’t know what to do with ourselves

[scarysigns]

[twerklina]

I’ve been waiting since March to post this...

[thebannedauthor]

Pet

Your cheeks burn as you watch Jacob barking out orders as you loiter by the cages, some of the Judges looking up at you expectantly with their eerie calm. You’ve had run ins with the man, some of which ended with you on the floor with weak knees and him smirking above you.

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